Mine has been full of emotions and rushing to finish 100 things. Not finished them at all, but it doesn’t matter. There’s this sense of fulfillment anyway.

One thing I’m really happy about is a new short video we posted on YouTube. It’s a time lapse of my try on a hot press paper with pen and ink and then watercolors. It’s been a pleasure as recently I didn’t get muc time for this kind of exercise. It’s an ink and watercolor peony flower timelapse. Let me know if you want to see a timelapse of something particular and I’ll try to do it.

Hope you like it! The technique is pretty simple and the result is nice 🙂

I got to work today on the patterns for our latest collection Boho Romance and thought about how great it would be if more people learn about the Photoshop PAT files. In our Etsy shop we get quite often questions like “the last ZIP contains only a PAT file and it is empty when I open it” or “what is this file? It’s not opening”. Unless you’re working extensively with various raster assets in Photoshop, digital papers vs photoshop patterns must sound like Greek to you.

Few years back I didn’t think there is much of a difference too. Until I discovered the ease of the use that PAT files give you. PAT files are files that Adobe Photoshop uses to store installable patterns. And the best part is that you can store your digital papers like that too.

So let’s start by defining “digital papers” – these are usually square formatted JPG files with repeating images like pattern. They are sized at 12×12 inches at 300 dpi. They can also be seamless (tileable) or not.

Photoshop patterns are rectangular images that the program executes as repeat pattern with the most simple type of tiling. Check out the illustration.

So what is the difference and why should you care? Photoshop patterns are gigantic time savers! Imagine you have a piece of text and you want to fill it with flowers. Like the one on the illustration bellow.

Photoshop Patterns

The first row is just typed with whatever color I had selected. The second row is the same word typed with the same color chosen, but then I applied a pattern overlay. You do that by going to the layers tab (if not open go to Window>Layers), select the text or shape or whatever layer you want to apply the pattern to and go to the Add Layer Style button at the bottom of the Layers tab.

A menu will open and you can choose some truly interesting options there, but I will stick to Pattern Overlay. It will open a dialog window for you to choose the pattern you want to apply, it’s blending mode, scaling %, opacity and if you want it aligned as the source pattern to the left upper corner.

In the small box on the right there is a miserable preview of the tiled pattern. Choose the pattern you want by clicking on the small arrow next to the pattern tile. A drop-down library will open to allow you to browse and choose from the patterns you have installed. Ha! Did you install any patterns? That is why we were giving you these PAT files. To make your life eeeeasy.

Ok, so when you click OK the Pattern Overlay is applied to the layer you selected and that’s it. You can go drink coffee now.

This is the clean way I love to use my patterns in Photoshop. You can’t do that with digital papers.

Actually you can, but you need to turn them to Photoshop patterns first. The digital papers come as JPG files most often. When you open a sheet of digital paper in Photoshop, you can print it the way it is or you can apply it to your design in a number of ways.

The Digital Paper

One way is to type your text and go to File>Place Embedded> choose your paper to import. The paper file is imported as a new layer above the layer with your text. Now select the paper layer, hold the Alt key (Option on Mac) and click between the paper layer and the text layer below it. This creates a clipping mask and the part of your paper that falls outside the text is made invisible.

This is an easy way to apply patterns to shapes and text, but if you have hundreds of patterns ( Or more!) , then you’re going to waste a lot of time looking for them on the hard drive, let alone if they’re not in a single folder. Ask me how I know. Another con to this method is that if you’re text is big and the paper file doesn’t cover it you’ll need to either tile the paper or scale it up. Now scaling up is a no-no for raster when talking about printing. Unless your file is of higher resolution (learn about it here) then I would stay away from scaling up. Tiling is just time consuming. And it won’t work at all if the paper was not designed for tiling i.e. seamless.

Here’s the result of the digital paper clipped to the text. If you want to change the scale, opacity or anything else here you need to apply the changes to the paper layer.

Next time I’ll show you how to make your own PAT files from the digital papers you already have.

Hey there and let me explain.

Here are few watercolor clipart elements. Can you tell which one is real watercolor, hand painted digital watercolor, which is traced watercolor turned vector and which is vector with applied watercolor style (done in either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator)?

The Parrot

So the parrot was hand painted on paper and then scanned and cleaned. After that it was traced in Adobe Illustrator and this is the result. It looks like watercolor. From distance only. If you zoom enough, you’ll see thousands of patch pieces that build it. Each such patch piece has a number of points that mark the curve of the shape and also has fill. At the end the file is heavy and one can super easy see it was traced. The traced clipart I’ve seen so far is worse than the raster original. It would come in a vector file like eps, ai or svg. We don’t sell traced clipart in our shop. If you want you can easily trace it by yourself 🙂 The real parrot is from our Forever collection and is a raster image.

The Frame shape

This sweet summery frame shape is actually a very simple vector shape with a fill. In the program (PS or AI) there is an option to apply a style to your objects. A style consists of various properties like stroke thickness, transparency, effects and so on. A watercolor style usually means that the object gets a look of watercolor. The style is often made of real scanned paper with watercolor paint on it and is a great way to treat text. As you see, it works on shapes too 🙂

To me this frame looks like cut out of watercolor painted paper and is a nice clipart element with good quality. This frame, even though originally a vector element is finally turned to either jpg or png. Not getting into too much detail on this. If you’re curious, let me know and I’ll do a post about it. Here you can see more similar frames.

The Rose

The rose, my beauty, is real watercolor painted on paper. It is then scanned and cleaned to be used as an element. Rich and deep color with distinctive edges of the petals. It is a lovely element and honestly, I don’t think I can make it like this in any other technique. Of course the rose would come as either jpg or png element. Actually it does, with a bunch of other roses and a cute kitten in the Purfect Ginger kit.

The Mermaid

Last on the list is the mermaid. Hand painted created in purely digital environment. From the pencil sketch to the last scale on her tale – digital. It was painted on a Cintiq tablet and I could’ve painted 5 more with real paint for the same time. Nice to play with though. The mermaid is painted on layers, so it can come as layered PSD (why would you need that?!) jpg or png. This sweets fish-gal is from Under The Sea turquoise set.

At the end of the day

what this means to you as a watercolor clipart user? it means you can use all of them if they’re to your liking. It’s a good idea to know the details of what you purchase so you know what to expect. There is slight difference between the last 3, but an eye not trained would not tell there is. I would personally stay away from mixing digital and real watercolor clipart.

Here’s a tip

Most illustrators design their clipart collections with a color scheme in mind and the elements are designed to work together. If you stick to a single collection or same artist, most likely your final design will have a consistent feel.

It’s true.

We have been working on and off on this clipart collection for close to a year and a half. It is worth it as I love the spirit of it and it needed time to show 🙂

At first we started it with an idea crystal clear . Sometimes it works like that. Til I got to the deer’s bow tie it was all hazy and I needed to leave it to the side for awhile. It was picked and put back to ripen a good few times.

Close to be finished now

but the gorgeous bear dude was released from duty and will maybe have it’s own show down the line. A fox lady left annoyed and incapable of waiting anymore … Went looking for a fuller life with more adventure in it. So long, my lovely!

Now we’re left with a crisp blue sky like the one you see when winter retreats and the sweet deer couple.

Some fresh flowers are in the working of course and I’m absolutely not telling you everything 🙂 Leaving some as surprise.

Wanna know about the difference between raster and vector images?

We see both raster and vector images everywhere around us, on packaging, on tv, in magazines. But what is the difference between them? Here we go 🙂

Raster images are a bunch of color dots and vectors are a bunch of dots (aka nodes or Bezier points ) that form a line. Simple enough, right? Let me go deeper.

Raster Images

When you go out shooting the autumn leaves or take a photo of the birthday boy, your digital camera makes a raster image file. This file contains various data like when and at what setting you made that shot, but most important – it has the info about each pixel and it’s position in the image.

The pixel is the smallest building element of any digital image. Like a tiny brick in a wall. The pixels color and lightness vary and they are positioned on a rectangle net. Here’s an example of image so enlarged that you can see the pixels and their positioning on the net.

Back to the images. When you shoot a picture, the camera saves it at a certain pixel size.

For example my phone camera shoots at 12 megapixels, which in this case is 3968 x 2976 pixels. Each pixel of these 11 808 768 has different color and lightness and they build the final picture I see. Like a puzzle.

Digital devices like a smartphone, laptop display, TV display or even digital photo frame, have the ability to reproduce digital images through light emission. Print devices like laser and inkjet printers can reproduce those same images on paper or other tangible surface by replacing pixels with ink dots. Here comes the question about the size.

All raster images are not created equal. Check the resolution.

The raster image resolution will give you a vital info – whether an image is intended for printing or for display. Printing requires higher resolution than display. Images for display are usually 72 ppi or 96 ppi (PPI stands for Pixels Per Inch), but again it depends on what exactly the purpose of the image is.

An industry standard is that raster images for print should be at least 300 DPI (DPI = dots per inch). For the sake of simplicity I’ll say that each dot represents a pixel.

If I want to know how large my phone camera image can print, I’ll have to do some simple math. Divide each pixel dimension to 300 (our print dots per inch) and in my case I get 13.22 x 9.92 inches. So this is what is called the physical size of an image at 300dpi.

If my inkjet printer is of superior quality or I want to use laser, I could print at 450dpi or even higher. Then the math will be 3968 : 450 = 8.81 inches for the long side and 2976 : 450 = 6.61 inches for the short side of my image. See how higher print resolution shrinks the physical dimensions of my photo?

What if you want to print your photo at exactly 4×3 inches at 300dpi? This is resizing and I’ll show you how you do it next time.

What if I want to print this otherwise big photo on a paper with size of 20×15 inches? A 27 megapixels photo would be required to get a good print, but my photo is only 12 megapixels. The result will be visibly jagged edges in contrasting areas and visible pixels overall. It is also called pixelation.

Some degree of pixelation is well accepted for prints that are intended to be observed from a distance.

Pixelation is also used sometimes absolutely intentionally in visual arts and design.

Vector images

Now that I find hard to explain! Bear with me.

Vector images are figures or shapes created from lines and curves. A line has at least two points (nodes) – beginning and end. Each end point has a handle that can be moved and bends the curve in the wanted direction. If a curve has 3 or more points, the inner points have two handles – left and right. Depending on the point kind the handles can move symmetrically, independently, but in one direction, or separately in different directions.

I’m not going into how to work with the Pen tool now, as this is a topic for a book or a few hours of video, but hope you get the idea of what vector is and how it is built.

Now the sweet part about using vectors and why graphic designers love them is that no matter how much a shape is enlarged, it will keep the number of it’s points and will not pixelate. You can enlarge a vector shape, then shrink it back and then enlarge it again (683 times) and it will still keep it’s quality, because it is a mathematical equation represented visually.

The downside of vectors for me is they’re never look alive as much as a watercolor image (that would be raster).

Of course good quality raster images can be traced (turned into vector), but this makes an almost pixelated version of the raster and usually doesn’t help a lot. But again, it depends on why one would need to trace an image.

File Formats

File formats are like surnames to your files 🙂 Raster and vector files are saved in different file formats and created / opened / edited by different programs. I promise another post or two to look at this under magnifying glass.

Raster files are usually created/opened/edited in photo editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Gimp (free program), Krita (free program), Pixlr (free program) and sooo much more. There may be tens of thousands of photo editing programs and each specializes in something more niche like editing for photography or digital painting etc.

Common file formats for raster images are tiff, jpg, png, psd. Some of these formats can be native to a certain program and be opened /edited only by it and some are popular and other programs open them too even though they’re native not to them. Such popular format is PSD, which is native to Photoshop, but can be opened by many other programs. A not so popular native format is the REB format which is native to Rebelle – a program specialised in digital painting.

When you purchase raster graphics on the web, they are usually distributed in a few very popular file formats – PSD, PNG, JPG and TIFF. PSD is used for layered files, when there is a need to preserve the layers separate to allow for changes. For example a poster design offered as layered PSD file would allow for color changes or text changes, so the customer can modify it to her/his needs.

A PNG or JPG format (flat files as they have 1 layer in them) would not allow for text change, even though some color changes can be achieved through various tools. Usually flat files are smaller in size than layered files. Both PNG and JPG are widely used for web where the size of the file is important factor.

TIFF files are great for keeping all color information in tact and are used by professionals in the print industry (but not only) because they’re lossless. They can be edited numerous times and saved and will not loose any quality, unlike the JPG files. JPGs loose a bit with each save.

Last about the raster formats – some of them can hold a vector layers. Like the PSD files, which can hold paths, vector shape layers and layer masks and vector smart objects (later on this). Same goes the other way around – some vector files can hold raster content (AI, CDR).

Now to vector file formats – most popular AI (native to Adobe Illustrator), CDR (native to CorelDraw), SVG, DXF (native to AutoCad), PLT and many more.

Same as for raster, the vector file formats are programmed to hold vector information mainly. They are created, edited and opened by special programs for vector editing like Adobe Illusrator, Corel Draw, Inkscape (free program), Autocad and many more.

Vector files are used both in print and for web. The SVG files are often replacing the PNG in design for web and in app design, as they provide sharp graphics no mater of the device screen size of the end user.

AI and CDR are also capable of saving layers (like the PSD) and those layers can hold raster.

PLT files are used mostly for cutting machines like cutting plotters in the advertising and pattern cutting in the garment industry.

DXF files are most popular where blueprints are made – machinery design, architecture etc.

I don’t want to get too much into detail. This post purpose is to scratch the surface and give you really basic knowledge of the difference between the raster and vector. When you go next time shopping for graphics you will know what are you purchasing and what to expect.

Hope this info will be helpful and shed some light for those who need it 🙂 Let me know if there’s something I missed to mention or you want to hear about.